Turquoise Lakes

These last few weekends Ali and I have been on a solid hiking schedule so we decided to keep it up. Due to some potential weather issues further north and south, we decided to drive to Beaver Creek Resort for this hike.

The trail head is technically called Beaver Creek Trailhead and it's quite different from your average start point. We parked in the Gerald Ford parking garage and then walked up to the bottom of lift 10 where the trail technically starts. From here, if you look up the mountain to your right, you can see a maintenance shed and a few signs that lead towards Beaver Lake and the Five Senses Trail. This trail will go past some maintenance sheds, small creeks, and a very rich neighborhood until you finally get outside of the official resort and start your uphill trek to Beaver Lake.

The hike to Beaver Lake is a little under 3 miles but it's a solid uphill trek. Luckily the path is fairly shaded and you follow a creek the majority of the time so it was a nice change of pace from our 14er last week. This part of the trail can get fairly busy as families go to Beaver Lake a lot but once we moved past it, we only saw one other person all day. Below is a picture of Beaver Lake.

After you get past Beaver Lake, the trail takes a more wooded/gradual uphill route than the first part. You continue weave around a river the majority of the time which is very pretty and offered some good background noise. About 5 miles into the hike you start to come across quite a few valleys as well that look like a perfect location for deer/moose but unfortunately we only saw one deer all day.

The picture below is ~.25 miles from Lower Turquoise Lake and ~1 mile from Upper Turquoise Lake. We started to see a lot of wildflowers around this area which was very pretty.

Below is a picture of Upper Turquoise Lake. Overall it was a pretty nice lake but unfortunately the wildfires were fairly bad and there was quite a bit of smoke/haze in the air which made some of the views not as clear as usual.

All-in-all I really enjoyed the hike. As I mentioned previously, it was a great change of pace after doing a 13er and 14er the last few weeks. This trail was very wooded and had a lot of water with creeks and 3 lakes. We ended up hiking ~15.5 miles in total with around a 3,000 elevation gain. So it was definitely a long hike but since the elevation was lower, it didn't feel nearly as bad.